Visit our site to sign up for the newsletter, explore past episodes, subscribe to the show, and help support our work. Summary If you are operating a website that needs to publish and manage content on a regular basis, a CMS (Content Management System) becomes the obvious choice for reducing your workload. There are a plethora of options available, but if you are looking for a solution that leverages the power of Python and exposes its flexibility then you should take a serious look at Wagtail. ...
May 21, 2016•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary As technology professionals, we need to make sure that the software we write is reliably bug free and the best way to do that is with a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline. This week we spoke with Pierre Tardy about Buildbot, which is a Python framework for building and maintaining CI/CD workflows to keep our software projects on track. Brief Introduct...
May 14, 2016•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary One of the biggest new trends in technology is the Internet of Things and one of the driving forces is the wealth of new sensors and platforms that are being continually introduced. In this episode we spoke with the founder and head engineer of one such platform named Onion. The Omega board is a new hardware platform that runs OpenWRT and lets you configure it using a numbe...
May 07, 2016•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary More and more of our applications are running in the cloud and there are increasingly more providers to choose from. The LibCloud project is a Python library to help us manage the complexity of our environments from a uniform and pleasant API. In this episode Anthony Shaw joins us to explain how LibCloud works, the community that builds and supports it, and the myriad ways ...
May 01, 2016•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary As Python developers we have all used pip to install the different libraries and projects that we need for our work, but have you ever wondered about who works on pip and how the package archive we all know and love is maintained? In this episode we interviewed Donald Stufft who is the primary maintainer of pip and the Python Package Index about how he got involved with the...
Apr 23, 2016•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary If you are responsible for managing any amount of servers, then you know that automation is critical for maintaining your sanity. This week we spoke with Tomaž Muraus and Patrick Hoolboom about their work on StackStorm, which is a platform for tracking and reacting to events in your infrastructure. By allowing you to register actions with event triggers it frees you from ha...
Apr 16, 2016•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Writing tests is important for the stability of our projects and our confidence when making changes. One issue that we must all contend with when crafting these tests is whether or not we are properly exercising all of the edge cases. Property based testing is a method that attempts to find all of those edge cases by generating randomized inputs to your functions until a fa...
Apr 09, 2016•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary In an attempt to improve the performance characteristics of the CPython implementation, Dino Viehland began work on a patch to allow for a pluggable interface to a JIT (Just In Time) compiler. His employer, Microsoft, decided to sponsor his efforts and the result is the Pyjion project. In this episode we spoke with Dino Viehland and Brett Cannon about the goals of the proje...
Apr 01, 2016•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Any programmer who has dealt with a website for any length of time knows that writing JavaScript isn’t always the most enjoyable. Wouldn’t you rather write that code in Python and just have it work on your website? In this episode we learn about Transcrypt with its creator Jacques de Hooge. Transcrypt is a Python to JavaScript transpiler that embraces the JavaScript ecosyst...
Mar 26, 2016•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to generate interactive 3D visualizations of physical systems in a declarative manner with Python? In this episode we spoke with Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood about the VPython project which does just that. They tell us about how the use VPython in their classrooms, how the project got started, and the work they have done to bring it into the...
Mar 18, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Ian Ozsvald and Emlyn Clay are co-chairs of the London chapter of the PyData organization. In this episode we talked to them about their experience managing the PyData conference and meetup, what the PyData organization does, and their thoughts on using Python for data analytics in their work. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Pytho...
Mar 12, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Efene is a language that runs on the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM) and is inspired by the Zen of Python. It is intended as a bridge language that serves to ease the transition into the Erlang ecosystem for people who are coming from languages like Python. In this episode I spoke with Mariano Guerra, the creator of Efene, about how Python influenced his design choices, why y...
Mar 04, 2016•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary What is functional programming, why would you want to use it, and how can you get started with it in Python? Our guests this week, Matthew Rocklin and Alexander Schepanovsky, help us understand all of that and more. Matthew and Alexander have each created their own Python libraries to make it easier to employ functional paradigms in your Python code. In this episode they he...
Feb 29, 2016•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Do you find yourself reaching for a different language when you need some extra speed? With Cython you can get the best of both worlds by writing your code in Python and executing it as compiled code. In this episode we were joined by Craig Citro and Robert Bradshaw from the Cython project to discuss how and when you might want to incorporate it into your applications. Brie...
Feb 19, 2016•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Are you struggling with trying to manage a series of related, interdependent batch jobs? Then you should check out Airflow . In this episode we spoke with the project’s creator Maxime Beauchemin about what inspired him to create it, how it works, and why you might want to use it. Airflow is a data pipeline management tool that will simplify how you build, deploy, and monito...
Feb 13, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Web Server Gateway Interface, or WSGI for short, is a long-standing pillar of the Python ecosystem. It has enabled a vast number of web frameworks to proliferate by not having to worry about how exactly to interact with the HTTP protocol and focus instead on building a library that is robust, extensible, and easy to use. With recent evolutions to how we interact with th...
Feb 07, 2016•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Looking for an open source alternative to Mathematica or MatLab for solving algebraic equations? Look no further than the excellent SymPy project. It is a well built and easy to use Computer Algebra System (CAS) and in this episode we spoke with the current project maintainer Aaron Meurer about its capabilities and when you might want to use it. Brief Introduction Hello and...
Jan 31, 2016•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary RPython is a subset of Python that is used for writing high performance interpreters for dynamic languages. The most well-known product of this tooling is the PyPy interpreter. In this episode we had the pleasure of speaking with Maciej Fijalkowski about what RPython is, what it isn’t, what kinds of projects it has been used for, and what makes it so interesting. Brief Intr...
Jan 22, 2016•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, join our Discourse community , and sign up for our mailing list. Summary If you are trying to build a web application in Python that can scale to a high number of concurrent users, or you want to leverage the power of websockets, then Tornado just may be the library you need. In this episode we interview Ben Darnell about his work as the maintainer of the Tornado project and how it can be used in a number of ways to power your next hig...
Jan 16, 2016•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, join our community Discourse, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Yves Hilpisch is a founder of The Python Quants, a consultancy that offers services in the space of quantitative financial analysis. In addition, they have created open source libraries to help with that analysis. In this episode we spoke with him about what quantitative finance is, how Python is used in that domain, and what kinds of knowledge are necessary to do ...
Jan 08, 2016•1 hr 11 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Because of its easy learning curve and broad extensibility Python has found its way into the realm of algorithmic trading at Quantopian . In this episode we spoke with Scott Sanderson about what algorithmic trading is, how it differs from high frequency trading, and how they leverage Python for empowering everyone to try their hand at it. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__...
Jan 03, 2016•1 hr 28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Python language is built by and for its community. In order to add a new feature, change the specification, or create a new policy the first step is to submit a proposal for consideration. Those proposals are called PEPs, or Python Enhancement Proposals. In this episode we had the great pleasure of speaking with three of the people who act as stewards for this process to learn more about ho...
Dec 27, 2015•2 hr 46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The first place we all go for learning about new libraries is the documentation. Lack of effective documentation can limit the adoption of an otherwise excellent project. In this episode we spoke with Eric Holscher, co-creator of Read The Docs , about why documentation is important and how we can all work to make it better. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast a...
Dec 20, 2015•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Python AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) is a powerful abstraction that allows for a number of innovative projects. ASTroid is a library that provides additional convenience methods to simplify working with the AST. In this episode we spoke with Sylvain Thénault from Logilab about his work on ASTroid and how it is used to power the popular PyLint static analysis tool. Brief Introduction Hello and ...
Dec 12, 2015•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary What is Solar Physics? How does it differ from AstroPhysics? What does this all have to do with Python? In this episode we answer all of those questions when we interview Stuart Mumford about his work on SunPy. So put on your sunglasses and learn about how to use Python to decipher the secrets of our closest star. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Pytho...
Dec 04, 2015•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary The Software and Data Carpentry organizations have a mission of making it easier for scientists and data analysts in academia to replicate and review each others work. In order to achieve this goal they conduct training and workshops that teach modern best practices in software and data engineering, including version control and proper data management. In this episode we had the opportunity to ...
Nov 25, 2015•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and subscribe to our mailing list. Summary Erik Tollerud is an astronomer with a background in software engineering. He leverages these backgrounds to help build and maintain the AstroPy framework and its associated modules. AstroPy is a set of Python libraries that provide useful mechanisms for astronomers and astrophysicists to perform analyses on the data that they receive from observational equipment such as the mountain observator...
Nov 20, 2015•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Service integration platforms have traditionally been the realm of Java projects. Zato is a project that shows Python is a great choice for systems integration due to its flexibility and wealth of useful libraries. In this episode we had the opportunity to speak with Dariusz Suchojad, the creator of Zato about why he decided to make it and what makes it interesting. Listen to the episode and th...
Nov 13, 2015•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Tom Rothamel is an embedded systems engineer who spends his free time working on Ren’Py, a visual novel engine written in Python. Ren’Py allows you to write interactive fiction experiences and deploy them across desktop and mobile platforms. By creating a purpose-built DSL for describing the interactions, users of Ren’Py can focus on crafting polished experiences without fighting through the va...
Nov 06, 2015•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Visit our site to listen to past episodes, support the show, and sign up for our mailing list. Summary Anthony Scopatz is the creator of the Python shell Xonsh in addition to his work as a professor of nuclear physics. In this episode we talked to him about why he created Xonsh, how it works, and what his goals are for the project. It is definitely worth trying out Xonsh as it greatly simplifies the day-to-day use of your terminal environment by adding easily accessible python interoperability. ...
Oct 31, 2015•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
